Trump produces enough real risks, so stop imagining fake ones

You've probably seen it passed around Twitter and Facebook:
A new poll finds
that 52% of Republicans would support postponing the 2020
election if President Donald Trump proposed doing so until
alleged voter fraud could be addressed.

Be smart before you share. It's a poll explicitly designed to
produce an alarming result and get you to talk about it.

And it worked.

Natalie Jackson, a pollster — but not the pollster who
commissioned this one –notes that the poll
included a series of questions about the prevalence of voter
fraud immediately before the question on the theoretical Trump
proposal. This is a technique known as "priming," posing lead-up
questions that put respondents in a mindset where they're more
likely to give you the answer you want on the question you plan
to report.

If you ask people a series of questions about terrorism risks
before asking about Trump's travel ban, they'll be more likely to
tell you they favor it. If you ask people a series of questions
about federal budget deficits before asking about a new spending
program, they'll be more likely to tell you they oppose it. If
you ask people a series of questions about the dangers of obesity
before offering them an ice cream sundae, they'll be more likely
to decline it.

So when this pollster asked respondents whether they believed
Trump had really won the popular vote, whether millions of
unauthorized immigrants had voted in the 2016 election, and
whether voter fraud was prevalent, the likely effect on
Republican respondents was obvious: to make them more inclined to
support the (entirely invented) Trump proposal to delay the 2020
election on account of voter fraud.

"So what?" you might say. "It's alarming enough that half of
Republicans can even be talked into wanting to postpone the
election!"

Trump
and Vice President Mike Pence.Thomson
Reuters

I'd say a few things about that.

One is that answering poll questions is cheap. People often just
give the response they think indicates they are on the right
"team" or that will annoy the other side.

The political scientist John Bullock and colleagues have found
that responses to factual questions change significantly when respondents are
paid for getting them right — they become less likely to give
the answer that corresponds to their "team" and more likely to
give the one that gets them paid. It follows that, on opinion
questions about hypothetical proposals, some respondents are
giving cheap, red-team/blue-team answers only because the stakes
are low.

Another is that hypotheticals create authority. Most likely,
nobody had floated the idea of postponing the 2020 election to
these respondents before, but some pollster has bothered to spend
time and money asking them about it. And in the hypothetical,
President Trump is for it, so how bad an idea could it be?

In the real world, if Trump proposed postponing the election,
he'd do so in an environment where he'd get pushback not just
from the media but from other Republican officials — who,
contrary to the popular narrative, have largely been supporting
Trump on policy issues where they agree, but resisting him
fairly effectively on his ham-handed efforts to exempt
himself from legal and democratic institutions.

Robert
Mueller.Alex Wong/Getty
Images

Trump can't even gather the political capital he would need to
fire special counsel Robert Mueller, an action he probably has the legal
authority to take. He's not going to manage to delay an
election.

This brings me to my last point on the poll, which is that
democratic institutions are not upheld because of an overwhelming
willingness of partisan voters to be subjected to them even when
they lose.

What would you have found if you had polled Democrats in December
2016 about a hypothetical proposal by President Barack Obama to
postpone Trump's inauguration pending an investigation of
irregularities in the 2016 election?

I am old enough to remember when liberals spent months urging
candidate Trump to respect the outcome of the presidential
election, and then spent weeks searching for One Weird Trick to
overturn the election's result. I am old enough to remember
grassroots Democrats
sending $7 million to Jill Stein in pursuit of some
cockamamie vote audit in Wisconsin.

And I am old enough to remember that the popular agitation to set
aside the results of a democratic election didn't come close to
mattering, and that our democratic institutions held up so well
that Hillary Clinton was there on the Capitol steps for Barack
Obama to hand power to Donald Trump as George W. Bush observed
that this was "some weird
s---."

Trump at his
inauguration.Thomson
Reuters

The United States held a presidential election during the Civil
War. If Trump actually makes some dumb proposal to postpone the
2020 election, that election will go ahead, too, the opinion of
some fraction of Republican partisans (less than the 52% this
poll found) notwithstanding.

There are some things that are genuinely alarming about the Trump
presidency. I have written about
Trump as the tail-risk president. The likelihoods of nuclear
attack and of great-power war, while still low, are substantially
higher under him than under a normal president — and are
unacceptably high.

Presidents have great unilateral authority in foreign policy, and
Trump could make mistakes that would kill millions of people.
This worries me a great deal — and given what has been
happening in North Korea, it worries me more this week than
it did last week.

But there is an ethos that has developed in a certain kind of
liberal — often, the kind that unironically uses hashtags like
#TheResistance and #NotMyPresident — that requires alarm about
everything.

The ethos requires inventing new and specious reasons to panic —
He deleted all the LGBT
content from the White House webpage! Half of his supporters
would cancel the 2020 election! He's inevitably going to undertake a coup! —
as though the actual reasons weren't enough.

"Don't normalize this!" they warn, repeatedly, until I worry they
will faint from exhaustion.

It is unsustainable for people to maintain a constant state of
panic for four years, unless they are willing to panic as a
hobby. And large parts of #TheResistance are eager to do exactly
that.

This is showing up in the turnout in special elections — Democrats are scoring
great turnout with the demographics most likely to be
interested in political hobbyism. Turnout is not as good with the
demographic groups you'd think of as most substantively imperiled
by the Trump presidency.

Perhaps this can be fixed by spending more time on real problems
and less time on imagined ones for people who perversely enjoy
constant feelings of panic.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly
attributed to Brendan Nyhan research about the effect of
financial incentives on the accuracy of partisan respondents'
answers to poll questions. This research was, in fact,
conducted by John Bullock, Alan Gerber, Seth Hill, and Gregory
Huber.